Under-Resourced Maintainers Pose Risk to Africa's Open Source Push

At a UN conference, experts warned that while open source software can expand access to technology globally, many projects and maintainers—especially in under-resourced regions—are vulnerable to supply-chain attacks. The report highlights the coordinated multi-year social-engineering compromise of the XZ Utils maintainer that led to exploitable code being introduced, and it advocates for stronger supply-chain hygiene (SBOMs, SCA), tooling (OpenSSF Scorecards, Sigstore), and education to reduce systemic risk.